


too vast a sound to be heard

by thishazeleyeddemon



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Illusions, Not Beta Read, Pre-Canon, Spiders, be my guest, but only slightly - Freeform, homage to American Gods, look if anyone wants to volunteer to, mainly in how this scene is handled
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-31 19:15:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18597694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thishazeleyeddemon/pseuds/thishazeleyeddemon
Summary: Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them... But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.- D.H. LawrencePeter Parker meets the Spider God. They have a job for him.





	too vast a sound to be heard

**Author's Note:**

> Listen. Listen. A generic Spider God would be fine, but the god that gave Spider Noir his powers was Kwaku Anansi. Anansi doesn't sound like that. I felt someone had to intervene.
> 
> This is part of an idea that I haven't written out in full yet. If I do, this would be the prequel.

_ The screams echoed from the writhing man down below. He flailed and slapped at the mass of arachnids that flowed up and over him like a wave, the chittering of their skittering legs making Peter’s skin crawl. Heart in his mouth, he pressed himself closer to the wooden rafter beam, eyes fixed on the scene below as nausea boiled in his stomach.  _

 

_ Air tickled over his hand. He shook it irritably, attention still on the man below and his terrified companions.  _

 

_ More tickling. He scratched his hand absently, heart stopping as his fingers touched a small, furry body. Peter snapped his gaze down in time to see a massive spider, nearly the size of his hand, eyes glittering like diamonds in the shadows of the roof, dig its massive fangs into his skin. _

 

_ A brief flash of hideous, lightning-bright pain burst inside him before the world spun, going white… _

 

Peter sat up, blinking. 

 

He was at a bar stool, at the speakeasy down on 23rd - the one that he had tricked some coppers away from once, since it was where some of the local queers went to hang out, away from anyone who wanted to start anything. It was a dark, warm place that smelled of alcohol and roses, from the perfume the owner’s girl, Jocelyn, bought at the druggist a few doors down.

 

A couple of people were at the bar, a couple more talking at the various tables. No one he knew super well, although he thought he’d seen all of them at least once - the woman at that table looked like someone Frederick Hardy had introduced to him once. The only unfamiliar person was a man at a table in a corner, drinking quietly, in a smart suit and a smart hat. His dark skin made him blend into the shadows of the bar. Peter gave him a cursory glare, which was returned with a blank stare. Whatever. If he was a copper Peter could turn him away.

 

He rubbed his head. Funny. He wasn’t sure how he’d gotten there. Probably had a few too many. And what do you know, there was a glass tankard in front of him, filled with some sparkling liquid. He sniffed it - smelled like whiskey. 

 

Peter tasted it. It tasted like whiskey, too - the purest, warmest whiskey he’d ever had, a bit sweet and smoky as it went down. Like whiskey condensed into its purest quintessence. 

 

“Hey, Josie,” he started, looking up. “Where’d you get this stuff? It -”

 

Josie was nowhere to be seen.

 

Peter looked up and down the bar. Josie wasn’t serving anyone else. He couldn’t see her anywhere else; not chatting up a patron, not mixing drinks behind the bar. She might have stepped out...but no, Josie never left the bar without getting someone else to run it. She called it a manner of professional pride, and her girl, the owner Maria, would laugh and point out were they  _ really  _ professionals if they were running an illegal establishment, and Josie would kiss her ear and tell her that professional just meant competent and skilled, not legal. 

 

It was  _ wrong  _ for Josie Curtis to not be at the bar when it was open without someone else to take her place. 

 

It was like a note in a song had been played wrong, a note of discord. Something was  _ wrong.  _ Peter looked down at his whiskey and pushed it away. His gut was churning. 

 

At the edge of hearing, something caught his attention. Someone was humming. It was low, under their breath even, but somehow Peter could hear it like it was right in his ear. He jerked his head around, looking for whoever it was, and something told him to look behind him. 

 

The man in the smart suit and the smart hat was still sitting at his table, tapping his fingers against the worn wood. He was humming, some song that Peter didn’t know. The tune was odd, unfamiliar. When he saw Peter looking, the man in the smart suit and the smart hat looked up and smiled. 

 

Peter glared at him and nodded stiffly. The man’s smile widened. He sat back in his chair, tipped his head to Peter, and took a swig from his tankard. 

 

Peter turned his gaze back to the rest of the patrons. They were still drinking happily, chatting without a mind for a single care. “Midnight Crew” was playing from somewhere unseen, and a couple of people were dancing or singing along, voices in surprising harmony. One of the ones who wasn’t was a man sitting a few stools down from him at the bar, head leaned on one hand. His eyes were closed. 

 

He reached over and tapped the man on the shoulder. 

 

“Hey fella, you know where Josie Curtis is?” 

 

The man’s head swung around like a door being opened slowly. He opened his eyes like he was Sisyphus pushing his rock up a hill and fixed Peter with a blank stare. His eyes were flat and empty, like no one was behind them.

 

O- _ kay _ , drunker than he thought ( _ a shiver ran up Peter Parker’s spine).  _ He mumbled a hasty “Never mind,” and turned away to face the rest of the patrons. No one had noticed the strange interaction, thankfully. When Peter’s attention was off of him, the man’s head slowly drifted back down to face the polished wood of the bar counter. 

 

The next two nearest to him were a pair of dames sitting together at a table, talking together. One had long, dark hair that flowed nearly all the way down to her waist and was being played with by her girl, a short stout blonde. Peter strode over and rapped gently at the table with his knuckles. 

 

“S’cuse me, either of you know where -” 

 

Both women’s mouths snapped shut with an audible click. Their heads drifted slowly so they were facing Peter, and behind their eyes was nothing, no sense that anyone was looking back at him. It was like looking at a corpse. Peter swallowed thickly and had a hard time suppressing the shudder. 

 

“Listen, do either of you know where -”  

 

The dark-haired girl raised her head so she was looking Peter right in the face with her cool, nothing eyes and let her mouth sag open, revealing a dark cavern. Peter furrowed his brow in confusion, when he saw movement from her inner depths. He stepped back just in time for one tiny, furry dark form to emerge from her mouth, then another, then another and another and another and another until the spiders had swarmed out of her in a writhing dark mass that coated the table. 

 

Peter shrieked, staggering backward and knocking over a chair. The spiders were flowing over the woman’s body now, the way  _ they had flowed over the body of the Goblin’s man, consuming him, tearing into his flesh -  _

 

He hadn’t been here, he’d been in the warehouse, he’d been investigating he’d been in the rafters he’d seen the statue break he’d been bitten -

 

  * What had happened?



 

Stumbling away from the horror show that was the empty woman, he fled to a corner of the bar to slump into a corner. It was a few seconds of breathing hard and the world spinning before he was able to look up again. 

 

The spider woman was gone. In her place was the blonde. Without her companion she was mindlessly drumming her fingertips on the table, staring off into empty space. And...he looked harder at the other patrons, heart skipping a beat as he saw clearly for the first time.

 

When he focused on one or two individual patrons, they were clear as day. But when he let his attention drift, they became...indistinct, blobs and swirls of color like he was seeing them in the distance with his glasses off, except not an optical illusion. 

 

Swallowing down the taste of panic that was rising in his mouth, Peter saw the one patron who didn’t become swirls of color and light, and the man in the smart suit and the smart hat saw him back. He was still sitting in the corner, humming softly. He smiled at Peter, and it didn’t reach his eyes. 

 

Peter strode over to his table in a rush, knocking a chair aside and slamming himself down opposite from the man in the smart suit and the smart hat. “Who are you?” he demanded, panic edging his voice higher. “What is this?”

 

“Ain’t that the question,” the man replied. His voice was deep, rich and sonorous like a the pound of a massive drum. Peter thought he could feel it vibrating through his bones. “Question I have for you is, who are you?” 

 

“Wh - what the hell do you mean?” Fear was making him snappish. The man only smirked, before standing and moving around the table to stand in front of Peter, leaning on another table and crossing his arms.

 

“What I said, kid. Who are you?”

 

“I’m -” Peter swallowed, his tongue thick in his mouth. “I’m Peter Parker - the hell do you mean?”

 

The man smirked, his eyes glittering under the brim of his hat. It was a friendly expression, but somehow Peter still felt on edge. It was like standing too close to a campfire, or running your finger along the blade of a knife. Not life-threatening, but not the most comfortable, either. 

 

“That’s what you’re  _ called,  _ Slick. No, I’m askin’ - who are you?” The man lacked a Brooklyn accent.

 

“A - a reporter?” Pete frowned. “A photographer? A nephew? What the hell do you want from me?”

 

“What did Benjamin Parker tell you the night after your parents were killed?”

 

The man watched as Peter sat very still for a few seconds. “Thinking through your next move,” he commented. “Very wise.”

 

“Alright,” Peter said slowly. “This is a dream, right?”

 

“What makes you say that?” He didn’t sound like he disbelieved him, though. He sounded more curious than anything else as if he desired a look into Peter’s thought processes. His eyes were very sharp; Peter shifted uncomfortably under his gaze.

 

“It...nothing looks right,” Peter admitted. “Josie isn’t at the bar, either, and there’s no one to replace her, which never happens. And there was the…” he turned to look where the woman full of spiders had been sitting, and shuddered. 

 

“It doesn’t feel like a dream, though,” he added and jabbed his thumb into the fleshy meat of his palm. “That always works in dreams, too. So - I don’t understand what’s happening.” 

 

The corners of the man’s mouth twisted upward in a sardonic smile, but he didn’t look malicious. More like someone, somewhere, had just told a very good joke that no one else understood. 

 

“No you don’t, do you,” he said. “Here’s your first clue, Peter - you can call me Mr. Nancy.” 

 

“Mr. Nancy,” Peter echoed. “Gotta say, it doesn’t ring a bell.”

 

Mr. Nancy’s smile faded. 

 

“No,” he said quietly. “It wouldn’t, would it.”

 

Peter looked at his face, but he could read nothing on it at all.

 

Mr. Nancy shook himself and looked Peter in the eye. “Well? What did he say?”

 

“You know already, don’t you.” Peter was very proud that his voice didn’t shake.

 

“Humor me, kid. What did he say?”

 

Peter exhaled a long, shaky breath, visions of the Vulture’s gore-streaked maw dancing behind his eyes. “If those in power can’t be trusted, it’s the responsibility of the people to remove them.” A wild, choking laugh burst out from behind his teeth. “Fat lot of good it did him, huh? Tried to remove the people in power, they remove you from this plane of fuckin’ reality!” 

 

“Sometimes,” Mr. Nancy acknowledged. “But you believe it anyway, don’t you. You live it anyway.” 

 

Peter tensed. “I...maybe. So what?” 

 

“More than you think, Parker. More than you think.” Mr. Nancy’s face was very serious. He leaned forward, and began. 

 

“What if I told you,” he started. “That the way this world is is for a reason.”

 

Peter’s snort made him blink. “I don’t need a sermon, Father,” Peter told him, and made to rise -

 

\- he found he couldn’t move from the chair. “Stay,  _ boy,”  _ Mr. Nancy snapped. “I’ve got a thing to say that I need you to hear.”

 

“Doesn’t look like I have a choice in the matter.” Peter leaned back in his chair, pretending to get comfortable. “Alright, let’s hear it.”

 

Mr. Nancy nodded, looking satisfied. He leaned back as well, producing a pipe from somewhere within the recesses of his dark jacket. He lit it so quickly that Peter missed his lighter, and took a long drag of whatever was in it. It smelled sweet and dusty, like the smell of sand, and made Peter’s head spin. When he closed his eyes, he saw a stately glittering palace underneath a blazing sun. 

 

There was something wrong with the palace. Something was...covering it. Something that hurt his eyes to look at, and that he didn’t know enough about to define. He breathed a long, slow, shaky breath.

 

“This world,” Mr. Nancy began in a voice like the thudding of tombstones, “is not as it should be.” He took another drag of his pipe and blew that strange, almost musky smoke into the air. “It’s my fault, I suppose, at least partially, although I stand that I had no idea what was going to happen.”

 

“What...happened?” Peter forced out between trembling lips.

 

Mr. Nancy sighed a long, sorrow-filled sigh. “Haven’t you noticed the way this world  _ works,  _ Parker? All this sorrow, all this tragedy, day after day after day with no change? You think that’s normal? Natural? You think that’s the way things are supposed to be?”

 

“It’s...the way things are,” Peter said slowly.

 

“Now it is. But it wasn’t always so. Once, the world was a place where good could win if it fought hard, where for every tragedy you could find an equal joy.” Mr. Nancy sighed again. “And what joys there were, I tell you. But now...now all that wins is tragedy. Over and over and fuckin’ over again, the same old story of the good being ground down no matter how strong they get or what plans they make.” He took another drag, blowing the smoke out in a white cloud. It formed the shape of a spider before fading away.

 

“What are you?” It came out before Peter could think better of it.

 

“We’re getting to that.” Mr. Nancy waved the question away. “But anyway - you understand me? Once - the world wasn’t kind, or fair, but it didn’t take sides. Anyone  _ could  _ win if they figured out how. That was before the colors disappeared, of course.”

 

Peter froze. “What?”

 

He had a notion that Mr. Nancy’s gaze could pin him like a butterfly under glass. “You saw it when you shut your eyes just then,” and it wasn’t a question. “The way it looked under the sun.”

 

“I...I didn’t understand it.” 

 

Another sigh, this one of resignation. “No, you wouldn't. It’s been too long. I’m not sure how well you lot would even take to the return of color - as entertaining as it would be, I could do without more doomsday prophets. They’re never very interesting after you’ve read their ravings once.”

 

“Mr. Nancy…” This felt risky, but this was building to something. “What does this have to do with me?”

 

Mr. Nancy grinned. He had too many teeth.

 

“I’m lookin’ for someone to share in a venture of mine,” he told him. He leaned forward, gaze intent. “I’m lookin’ for someone to write some new stories in this world. World’s been dancing the same tune for too long, it’s time for someone to shake things up a little, start a new song going. You know how Benjamin Parker told you to take power away from those who didn’t deserve it?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“Want some help?” 

 

Peter swallowed hard. Neither man moved for at least a minute.

 

“Who are you?” Peter asked again. “Why me?” 

 

“Kids,” Mr. Nancy sighed. “Always worrying about trifles. You want to know who I am?”

 

Peter nodded, and Mr. Nancy smirked and removed his hat.

 

Peter could still see the tall, dark-skinned man in a suit sitting across from him. But sitting in the same place was a vast spider with mandibles bigger than Peter’s head and eyes like the plains of space, chittering away; and in the same place as that was a king dressed in a fine robe and an elegant flowing headdress, face covered in paint and with eight glowing eyes, lounging on a throne; in the same place as him was a young boy, clothes plainer and more ragged than Peter’s but with bright, clever eyes and a proud stance; and last was a little spider, smaller than Peter’s hand, spinning its web in a bush.

 

Peter saw all of these things and knew that they were one thing.

 

“Was a time,” said the things that had been Mr. Nancy, “When Kwaku Anansi was known to every man jack from here to the seas at the end of the world. That’s only part of the rot that they caused, of course, but if you don’t mind me saying so I think it’s rather a big one.” Mr. Nancy -  _ Kwaku Anansi -  _ replaced his hat, and was suddenly only a tall, dark-skinned man again. But when Peter looked at him, he still saw those eight nebulaic eyes, burning away in the shadows underneath the brim of the hat.

 

“As for why you,” Anansi continued, “You were there, kid. Isn’t that all a hero needs? To be there?”

 

“What is it that you want me to do exactly?” Peter’s mouth was dry. He thought, a bit distantly, as if he was outside himself, that he might have been trembling.

 

“What I said, kid. Get some new stories going! Be a hero like Benjamin Parker wanted you to be. Be a change of pace from all this drab murder and sadness all the time. It’s fun for a few run-arounds, but it gets boring real fast.” Anansi waved his hands, and a tankard appeared in front of him. “Drink. You sound awful.”

 

Peter drank. 

 

“Why can’t you do it yourself?” he asked when he was done. “You must be very powerful to pull this off.”

 

Surprisingly, Anansi frowned.

 

“Was a time I would have,” he acknowledged. “Was a time I’d have been out in the world, stirring up mischief just for the hell of it. But that’s...off the table for now. At least until I can get a few things going?”

 

“What sort of things?”

 

“Don’t worry about it.”

 

Fair enough. Peter drank some more. “You said ‘they’. So the way this world is is someone’s fault, then.”

 

“Some _ thing,”  _ Anansi corrected, “and I can’t tell you more right now. Got some of my own poking powerful people first, but I’m better at that then you. All you gotta do is hero around for a while, avoid gettin’ caught, and when I’m ready, I’ll let you know.” 

 

Peter nodded. “Alright. I’ll help you. But -”

 

“Yeah?” Anansi raised an eyebrow. 

 

“What was with the uh, spooks before?” 

 

Anansi grinned. It made him look rather handsome, in Peter’s opinion. “Had to give you a little test, didn’t I? See how you reacted in unfamiliar situations. It’s a traditional aspect of the hero’s journey.”

 

Peter nodded again, remembering the way he’d shouted. He hoped he wasn’t blushing. 

 

“How exactly are you going to help me fight powerful people if you can’t be in the world properly?” He took another swig of his tankard before a thought occurred to him. “Also, what am I drinking right now?” 

 

Anansi laughed, a big, hearty laugh that filled the room. “You’ll see.”

 

He rose from the table, and offered Peter his arm. Peter took it and rose to his feet. 

 

“It’ll probably be a while before I talk to you in person again,” Anansi told him. “In the meantime, keep this whole exchange to yourself, huh? There’s certain folk who don’t need to know about me, and don’t need to be able to hear it from anyone. Can you keep a secret?”

 

“I’ve been running interference for a bar full of queers,” Peter told him. “I can keep a secret like the grave.”

 

“Good. Well, in that case,” he said, and tipped his hat to Peter, “I believe this meeting is adjourned.” 

 

He smiled, showing off spidery mandibles protruding from his mouth.

 

“See you soon.”

 

The world went dark.

 

Peter groaned when he woke up, all the blood having rushed to his head. He was swathed in something soft and warm, his head pounding.

He managed to open his eyes, and felt dizzy. The floor was above him, like a gray concrete sky. 

 

He with some wiggling, managed to look up. He was swathed in a giant cocoon of webbing. 

 

Great, he thought. Anansi has a sense of humor.

 

_ Fin. _

 


End file.
